Voynich TEI

The Voynich Manuscript remains one of the most enigmatic and undeciphered texts in the history of manuscript studies. Despite extensive scholarly attention, research has often been hindered by the manuscript’s undeciphered script, complex visual organization, and limited interoperability between textual and visual data. This project addresses these challenges through a digital humanities approach that re-encodes the manuscript’s herbal section within a structured TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) framework.

Using René Zandbergen’s widely used transliteration files as a foundation, this project transforms existing plaintext transliterations into a semantically structured TEI file designed for scholarly research. This project treats each illustrated plant as a discrete, encoded entity. By identifying and organizing plant illustrations within the TEI format, the project manages to systematically link transliterated text to corresponding botanical imagery while preserving the manuscript's unique glyphs and visual layout.

This structured encoding makes the Voynich Maniscript more machine-readable, searchable, and computationally accessible. Ultimately, this work demonstrates how careful TEI encoding can transform a famously opaque manuscript into a structured research environment, providing digital humanists, manuscript scholars, and students with new tools to explore one of history’s most persistent textual mysteries.